Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I'm sure they did know exactly what piracy was. I'm sure that people know exactly what Nazi's are as well, but that doesn't mean when someone calls someone else a Nazi on the internet they really think those people are followers of Hitler. It's simply a rhetorical device designed to make the reader think the other person is a bad person.
Appropriating the term pirate achieved exactly the same purpose. In 1601, the complaint was that other publishers were not honoring the monopoly granted to printers. Since most people who were not printers at the time failed to see how terrible such practices were, the printers appropriated the term pirate to equate the two acts. It was purely a rhetorical device.
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You're arguing that people who use the term "Nazi," pejoratively (she wondered, is there another way to use it?), to describe "bad people"
somehow is correlative to saying that the 1601 use of the term "pirate" to describe that a publisher was
not honoring the monopoly granted to printers, is
worse than using it to describe someone who steals or infringes someone else's book,
not honoring the copyright monopoly granted to the writer--even though the net result is
exactly the same?
How is it, exactly, that you see copyright infringement, today, as
different than a publisher not honoring the printer's monopoly, in 1601?
- When publishers didn't honor the printer's monopoly, the printer/publisher of the book that held the license, didn't get paid his rightful royalties/fees;
- when someone today infringes Jane Doe's copyright, on her book, she doesn't earn the sales royalty that she would, either as a self publisher or a trade-published author.
- When the "word pirate" of 1601 illegally distributed a book, he kept the resulting payments;
- when a "pirate" takes a book and republishes it to a pirate site where the publisher is paid for the copies he sells, the original author and copyright owner doesn't receive those fees, most certainly. The thief/infringer does. Not the copyright owner.
- Sure, there are pirates who put a book up for free, on Dark Web and piracy sites, allowing any Tom Dick or Harry to download it.
- Are you trying to make some distinction, that this is somehow "less bad" than those who steal a book and sell it themselves? And if not, how are you saying that this correlates to people using "Nazi" to mean a bad person?
That the pirates who infringe, to put the book up for free on pirate sites...nope, I don't see it. How is using the term, piracy--coined for
exactly this activity, in 1601, somehow being used histrionically, to discuss infringement?
Hitch